makewhatis was recently fixed to produce reproducible output (r307003) and later the format changed and is no longer sqlite (r312593). Unfortunately the installed makewhatis is used by installworld. When installing to the local system everything works as desired, as the new makewhatis will be installed. When installing to DESTDIR (for producing VM images, FreeBSD-update builds, etc.) the host's makewhatis is used and depending on the version may produce nonreproducible or incorrect format output. Revision links: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=307003 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=312593
Link to reproducible-build CI test run diffoscope output that highlighted this issue: https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/freebsd/dbd/freebsd_master_gitd0cb282.tar.xz.html
A commit references this bug: Author: emaste Date: Wed Jan 30 19:19:14 UTC 2019 New revision: 343589 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/343589 Log: freebsd-update: regenerate man page database after update These are currently not reproducible because they're built by the makewhatis on the freebsd-update build host, not the one in the tree. Regenerate after update, and later we can avoid including it in freebsd-update data. PR: 214545, 217389 Reviewed by: delphij MFC after: 1 month Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D10482 Changes: head/usr.sbin/freebsd-update/freebsd-update.sh
A commit references this bug: Author: emaste Date: Tue Mar 5 18:10:07 UTC 2019 New revision: 344799 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/344799 Log: MFC r343589: freebsd-update: regenerate man page database after update These are currently not reproducible because they're built by the makewhatis on the freebsd-update build host, not the one in the tree. Regenerate after update, and later we can avoid including it in freebsd-update data. PR: 214545, 217389 Reviewed by: delphij Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation Changes: _U stable/12/ stable/12/usr.sbin/freebsd-update/freebsd-update.sh
A commit references this bug: Author: emaste Date: Tue Mar 5 18:11:37 UTC 2019 New revision: 344800 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/344800 Log: MFC r343589: freebsd-update: regenerate man page database after update These are currently not reproducible because they're built by the makewhatis on the freebsd-update build host, not the one in the tree. Regenerate after update, and later we can avoid including it in freebsd-update data. PR: 214545, 217389 Reviewed by: delphij Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation Changes: _U stable/11/ stable/11/usr.sbin/freebsd-update/freebsd-update.sh
Does the problem still exists or can we close the bug report?
AFAIK we have workarounds in place but the underlying issue still exists.